"Don't say that, Mrs. Hankey; it always seems so lonely to leave money to charity, as if you was nothing better than a foundling. But how did you enjoy the sermon this morning?"
"I thought that part about the punishment of the wicked was something beautiful. But, to tell you the truth, I've lost all pleasure in Mr. Sneyd's discourses since I heard as he wished to introduce the reading of the Commandments into East Lane Chapel. What's the good of fine preaching, if a minister's private life isn't up to his sermon, I should like to know?"
Mrs. Bateson, however, had broad views on some matters. "I don't see much harm in reading the Commandments," she said.
Mrs. Hankey looked shocked at her friend's laxity. "It is the thin end of the wedge, Mrs. Bateson, and you ought to know it. Mark my words, it's forms and ceremonies such as this that tempts our young folks away from the chapels to the churches, like Miss Elisabeth and Master Christopher there. They didn't read no Commandments in our chapel as long as Miss Farringdon was alive; I should have liked to see the minister as would have dared to suggest such a thing. She wouldn't stand Ritualism, poor Miss Farringdon wouldn't."
"Here we are at home," said Mrs. Bateson, stopping at her own door; "I must go in and see how the master's getting on."
"And I hope you'll find him better, Mrs. Bateson, I only hope so; but you never know how things are going to turn out when folks begin to sicken—especially at Mr. Bateson's age. And he hasn't been looking himself for a long time. I says to Hankey only a few weeks ago, 'Hankey,' says I, 'it seems to me as if the Lord was thinking on Mr. Bateson; I hope I may be mistaken, but that's how it appears to me.' And so it did."
On the afternoon of that very Sunday Christopher took Elisabeth for a walk in Badgering Woods. The winter was departing, and a faint pink flush on the bare trees heralded the coming of spring; and Elisabeth, being made of material which is warranted not to fret for long, began to feel that life was not altogether dark, and that it was just possible she might—at the end of many years—actually enjoy things again. Further, Christopher suited her perfectly—how perfectly she did not know as yet—and she spent much time with him just then.
Those of us who have ever guessed the acrostics in a weekly paper, have learned that sometimes we find a solution to one of the lights, and say, "This will do, if nothing better turns up before post-time on Monday"; and at other times we chance upon an answer which we know at once, without further research, to be indisputably the right one. It is so with other things than acrostics: there are friends whom we feel will do very well for us if nobody—or until somebody—better turns up; and there are others whom we know to be just the right people for the particular needs of our souls at that time. They are the right answers to the questions which have been perplexing us—the correct solutions to the problems over which we have been puzzling our brains. So it was with Elisabeth: Christopher was the correct answer to life's current acrostic; and as long as she was with Christopher she was content.
"Don't you get very tired of people who have never found the fourth dimension?" she asked him, as they sat upon a stile in Badgering Woods.
"What do you mean by the fourth dimension? There are length and breadth and thickness, and what comes next?"